Is It a Civil War? Not Yet

 Things are truly awful in the US, so is this the time to get pedantic?  Well, maybe.  I posted on bluesky that I was more worried about events in Minnesota than in/re Greenland.

 

In the ensuing discussion, I got some pushback--that the US is already in a civil war and any suggestion that it isn't means that I am minimizing what is going on here.  This is giving me flashbacks to the Jan 6 is a coup or not a coup arguments.  In the aftermath, I argued that the events of January 6th were an insurrection and, yes, an autogolpe (self-coup) and not a coup d'etat.  The latter has two dynamics that were not present that day--the involvement of significant elements of the coercive arms of the state (military, secret police, etc) and an effort to change who is in power.  I argued that this put the attention in the wrong places as the focus should have been on the White House and Congress, not the military.

This time?  Why is this not a civil war?  Again, two key ingredients are not yet present with one more important than the other.  First and not quite as important: scale.  Thus far, the violence is quite limited even as it is appalling and awful.  Civil wars are large scale things, and, yes, we social scientists usually use numbers to distinguish between categories of events.  For inter-state wars, we tend to use 1000 battle deaths.  For civil wars, we use all kinds of numbers, but even if we set it as low as 25, I am not sure we are there yet.  Second, and most importantly, civil wars are two-way affairs (or more so, as we saw in Bosnia and Syria and elsewhere), and the violence in the US has been an entirely one-sided thing--the state is engaging in much violence against protestors, but the other side of this, the anti-Trump, anti-ICE forces are not using any significant violence against the government's forces .... thus far.  

Which makes what is happening in Minnesota, Chicago, Portland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere state repression (you can call it state terrorism). And that is truly awful and part of the US becoming an autocracy (although democracies repress as well).  Again, this is important for both social science reasons and accountability reasons.  For political scientists, it allows us to compare this to similar events in the American history and around the world (Tianamen Square?) to note key dynamics and make predictions and policy recommendations.  For accountability, calling it a civil war suggests there are two sides that may have some responsibility here.  And, damn it, we know that this is being entirely driven by Trump and his regime.  The violence is very one-sided, with all of the responsibility for the bloodshed in the hands of Trump, ICE/DHS, and the Republicans (as they hold power in the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court).  

Does this mean this is not serious, that I am minimizing the event?  I sure as hell don't think so--when the power of the state is being used to kill and kidnap and deport without any due process, so very capriciously and so much by one ethnic group aimed at others, it is very, very serious indeed.

If people want to use "civil war" for rhetorical purposes, go right ahead.  It is not my job to tell people how they should resist these abuses of power, this persecution, and, yes, these massacres (are massacres a scale thing? I am not sure).  I am not going to tone police folks, but I am also not going to change how I talk about this stuff online.  I seek to analyze, to explain, to compare, and to contrast.  And being consistent with the usual scholarly use of terms is helpful in those efforts. 

Pondering the Priorities of AntiSemitism and Israel

 I have been thinking about the role of Israel in Jewish identity thing for a few years now, perhaps stirred by my trip to Israel in 2019 and definitely energized by the violence since October 2023.  And then I saw a piece about how the Anti-Defamation League essentially gave Musk a pass on being an antisemite (although there may be some regret, real or feigned) because he was "pro-Israel."  That really yanked my chain, so I am about to spew about this stuff, and it will probably piss a lot of people off, but so be it.  

As always, my caveat on this stuff: I have often said that my parents are Jewish, suggesting that I am not since I don't believe and never believed.  However, as Charlottesville reminded me, the antisemites don't care about belief, and I would be sent to the camps/gas chambers/ovens along with the devout.  The key here is that I really have never thought that hard about Israel in Jewish identity, and this will be where I do that thinking based not on a thorough examination of the Torah, the Talmud, or religious scholarship but based on my background as a scholar of ethnic (yes, to me, religion is one kind of ethnic identity) conflict.   So, some of my thoughts here may be wildly ignorant or sound stupid.

First, we have to say this as clearly as possible: being pro- or anti- Israel does not really tell us that much about whether one is pro-Jew or antisemite (I don't use "philosemite" for reasons I have explained earlier.)  Evangelicals who are pro-Israel also want to wipe out Jewish identity by converting all Jews to their version of Christianity or watch them burn after the Rapture (seeing Jews as a means to an end is inherently antisemitic).  The Musk-ness of it all is a reminder: he is supposedly pro-Israel, but he is also pro-Great Replacement Theory, which puts Jews at the heart of the conspiracy to replace white people in the US and elsewhere with non-white people.  And there is that Nazi salute and his very antisemitic AI and all the rest.  Likewise, you can have people who are pro-Jew who are critical of Israel--there are numerous left-leaning Jewish groups in the US and Canada who have been protesting the policies of Israel even before the utterly corrupt Netanyahu (friend of antisemites) took power and before the violence reached the levels of the past two years. 

So, the 2x2 of Israel-support and pro/antiSemitism illustrates the reality that while there might be a relationship, each box is filled enough that we have to add other variables to get anywhere (note that the ultra-Orthodox Jews would be pro-Jewish but oppose a Jewish state until the biblical requirements are met--the Messiah comes, thanks to a friend for pointing this out).

It makes clear that one's stance towards Israel does not actually say much on its own about one's stance towards Jews. 

Second, Israel is clearly central to Jewish identity, but I have to ask what we mean by "Israel?"  Do we mean the land, the people, or the state?  So much of the ancient history of that place is central to Judaism.  The centrality of the story of Moses in Judaism is a good illustration--this big hunk of doctrine/belief/whatever is focused on getting Jews back to the lands that God gave them (note, the Torah and other texts depict that whole getting that land from God as, well, quite violent--the land was hardly empty even way back).*  In the various prayers and songs and services, Jerusalem and the land of Israel feature quite prominently.  During the last set of services I went to, I was so very struck by the Israeli flag being on the bima (the podium)--which refers to the state of Israel but can be conflated with government (note that the Canadian flag these days means many different things thanks to the convoy assholes and other false patriots).  It is so much so that it is taken for granted, and I didn't really think that much about it until recent years.  That makes me a lousy Zionist, another way I could disappoint my father.  

But as I think about it now, I wonder about the conflation of land and government.  Yes, the Jews got their safe harbor after World War II and the Holocaust in the land they long identified with.  And once you control a land, you develop a state and a government.  So, Jews could identify with the state of Israel, but do they have to identify with the Israeli government?  This is the key point that has been gnawing at me.  All governments are flawed and are thus deserving of criticism. But a holy place in a religion is probably not supposed to be criticized--the Vatican, Mecca, and the like--and are beyond reproach.  So, maybe folks get a bit upset about the criticism of Israel because it is holy to Jews?  

Of course, there is the whole "should a Jewish state exist?" question, whether Zionism is legitimate or not, hangs over all of this, but I am going to put it to the side for now (I will get to it some day, really).  Right now, I am just teasing out what it means to care as much or more about Israel than about the plight of Jews.  Because the fundamental assertion here is that they are not the same thing especially if one is thinking of Israel as government as opposed to Israel as holy place.

Third, now I have arrived at the stuff that is partly responsible for my state of anger and frustration: the contradictions between the imperatives of antisemitism and of being pro-Israel.  The ADL article makes it pretty clear that the latter has taken over the former, and that is certainly the case in American politics as well--that the concern about antisemitism, a real thing, on American campuses is mostly a concern about people being hostile to the government of Israel (again, some of them may be hostile to the state of Israel or to the Jewish people, but Trump, the GOP, and others are not focused on those ideas/identifications).  The article inspiring my post clearly shows how the ADL and others are now identifying Jews who are critical of Israel as being antisemitic--Jew-hating Jews.  While there are such people in the world, to protest genocide, to want a non-far right Israeli government, to want an Israeli government to be led by non-corrupt autocrat wannabees, to question the wisdom or legitimacy of a theocracy does not make one antisemitic.  

In the piece, accusing Israel of genocide is called blood libel, which shows how far this has gone. Blood libel refers to the accusations/conspiracy theories about the Jews killing Christian babies so they can drink their blood, a truly awful set of ideas that have around forever.  That is not the same thing as looking at Israel's deployment of violence against the Palestinians and raising questions about whether there is an effort to eliminate in whole or in part the Palestinian people.  Have I committed blood libel in my recent post?  That is not only stretching a concept so much that it becomes utterly meaningless, but it essentially defines criticism of the Israeli government as akin to the worst forms of antisemitism, and by no accident at all, aims to silence all criticism of Israel.  

I have note that we live in a moment where truly vile antisemitic people are taking pro-Israel and supposedly anti-antisemitic stances to attack universities, to attack free speech, to disrupt the Democrats, to dazzle the media with bullshit, and to distract from other stuff.  The living embodiment of this is Stephen Miller, who, yes, is Jewish, but has betrayed every lesson from the Holocaust and has become essentially the Heydrich or Himmler of our time.

Fourth, I will make a particularly provocative claim: the job and priority of the ADL and other organizations as well as the first priority of Jews in North America should be ... the safety of Jews in North America and not the government of Israel (and not even the state or people of Israel).  It is the job of AIPAC and other lobbying organizations to be focused on policy towards Israel, but if antisemitism is a great threat (and I agree that it is), the focus should be on protecting Jews.  Of course, Israeli Jews will say that the safety of Jews depends on the safety and independence of Israel.  They will say that if Jews want to be safe, don't focus on improving their safety in the US or Canada, but move to Israel.  Indeed, my trip to Israel six years ago gave me the impression that Israeli Jews are not so fussed about the plight of American or Canadian Jews.  

Ethnic conflict digression: Thinking about it now reminds me of my work on Greater Hungary in the irredentism book I wrote with Bill Ayres--that the Hungary's Hungarians of the 2000s identify somewhat with the Hungarians outside of Hungary but not completely so.  That the outsiders may share the same language but they haven't experienced post-1956 Hungary, so they aren't quite the same.  I am positive that Israeli Jews identify somewhat with North American Jews, but these outsiders are not the same as, even lesser than because they have not committed fully--they haven't moved to Israel--and by not sharing the same experiences of being under rocket attacks, have not fought in the various wars, haven't been subject to terrorism, etc.

Fifth, why is there more antisemitism in the US and Canada these days? There is clearly more violence aimed at Jews lately yet the overall count is inflated by folks calling criticism of Israel as examples of antisemitism:

"There had been more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents in the three months after October 7, he said, a 360 percent jump over the same period a year before. But in January 2024, the organization’s researchers conceded to the Forward that the increase was in part derived from a change in methodology. “Anti-Zionist chants and slogans” now accounted for more than 40 percent of the total incidents"" From here.

 However, there clearly has been a significant increase in violence aimed at North American Jews (I am guessing there is more Islamophobic violence as well, but that, too, is a post for another day).  Obviously, the rise of far right parties and actors within the political systems and within the media goes a long way.  Trump and his team have been amplifying all kinds of hate since his first campaign started, and a core part of that has been hate aimed at Jews.  The elevation of Great Replacement Theorists, the Republican focus on George Soros as the boogeyman of our time, not unlike the centrality of the Rothchilds in European anti-semitism of yore, Musk amplifying Nazis on twitter--this is all really bad for TeamJew in North America (and Europe). The right wing antisemites also have permission to deploy violence given the appearance of antisemities like Nick Fuentes at Mar Lago and the White House, and I am sure they think they have greater impunity given Trump's abuse of the pardon power and the far right take over of the Department of Justice.**

Antizionist groups and speakers are not all pro-Israel or pro-Jew, of course.  There are plenty of actors out there that conflate hate of Israel with hate of Jews, and they are deserving of condemnation and criticism.  Are they new or are they a constant?  Again, if we have more of something, we can't explain that with a constant, so what has changed?  I don't want to go too far because everyone has agency, but if left-wing/progressive antisemitism has always been burning, what tossed gasoline to inflame that some?  I can't help but think that actions of the government of Israel have some responsibility for the increase in antisemitic violence in North America.  People are angrier now because Israel is laying waste to Gaza and so antisemites are now more energized to direct their hate towards Jews.  I am not justifying the increase in violence--I am opposed to all collective punishment, whether it is punishing Jews for what Israel is doing or punishing Palestinians for what Hamas has done.

Finally, the Intelligencer piece also includes info about how the ADL dropped a lot of its civil rights stuff of late. That after Trump was elected for a second time, poof, ADL's stuff on transgender, LGBTQ+, voting rights, racial justice, and the like had disappeared from the website.  That the lesson of Never Again was being narrowed--not Never Again shall a people face the threat of genocide or similar violence, but that Never Again will Jews be threatened.  I was taught the former definition, and it will be the one I stick with.  The various horsemen of hate ride together almost always. Being opposed to racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, and the like is not a distraction from fighting antisemitism--it is the same damned fight.  That the ADL is selling all of that out to appeal to Trump and to appeal to the right as they focus on anti-Zionism as antisemitism is not only an incredible betrayal but quite self-destructive. 

Well, that's a lot.  I included way too many digressions but also dodged some obvious stuff.  What is my point?  That it is fucked up that organizations and actors that supposedly exist to fight antisemites are giving antisemites cover because of their pro-Israel stances.  That focusing so much on protecting Israel from criticism is doing lots of people a tremendous disservice and not just the Palestinians.  That there are great threats in the US to Jews, and we need to think about how to reduce those threats and giving Israel carte blanche may not be helpful in that endeavor.  That declaring any government to be immune from criticism is just wrong.

 

 *  One thing I learned when I visited Israel in 2019 is that so much of the land is, well, crappy.  Lots of rocks, especially around Jerusalem.  Sure, the beaches in Tel Aviv are nice, but the idealization of this land, well, always pokes at me.

** While all antisemitism is bad, I seem to be taking the opposite view of Israeli Jews and of Netanyahu in particular.  I think that right-wing antisemites are worse because they threaten far more violence (and they admire those who killed six million Jews) than left-wing antisemites. Netanyahu and his ilk don't mind so much the right-wing antisemites but deplore the left-wing ones, perhaps because they care more about their anti-Israel stances than they do about the threats to Jews in the west.   

 

White Nationalist Outbidding, 2024

 Nikki Haley's "what about slavery?" statement reminds us that the 2024 campaign is one of ethnic outbidding--specifically, white nationalist outbidding.  I have been writing about ethnic outbidding for quite some time, in my own academic work, and then applied to the US especially in the age of Trump.  To be clear, the concept is not mine.  It was most clearly articulated by Donald Horowitz--that when multiple politicians or parties compete for support from an homogenous group in a heterogeneous society, they will be tempted/pressured to outbid each other in their promises to be the best defender of that group.* 

In 2016, Trump was best positioned to win this auction, this competition for ever more extreme voters, as he was willing to say anything, including banning Muslims, and, yes, his personality feeds into it as he always wants to top other folks.  After the 2020 election, Fox News felt pressure from its right, as it initially recognized Trump's defeat, but started to lose market share to OAN and other far right outlets.

In the 2024 race, the competition to be the best white nationalist (I tend to prefer white supremacist but YMMV) is so evident with non-white candidates like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott appealing to the white vote.  Many have noted the irony or hypocrisy of those running to lead the Party of Lincoln getting all soft on slavery.**  Haley once was on the right side of history, lowering the confederate flag from government buildings when she was governor of South Carolina.  But that was before Trump changed the permission structure of Republican politics.  Now, to compete at the national level, one must establish one's white nationalist bona fides by being pro-confederacy.  [Save me the BS about state's rights, as SC's secession and pretty much every other one was based on the selective state's right to support the institution of slavery and oppose the rights of non-slave-holding states to regulate their own borders].  

To be clear, ethnic outbidding refers to pressures and temptations--the fear of losing white voters to other candidates or the temptation to pander to extremist voters to get a leg up on more moderate candidates.  Candidates and parties still have agency. They have a choice to make, often a tough one, but they can choose to go another way at some cost.  Fox could have been willing to risk losing some market share to far right outlets.  Nikki Haley could have risked losing some share of the electorate to others, with the hope that she could corner the market of reasonable Republicans (if such a beast still exists).  The challenge is that we know that the most enthused voters show up at primaries, and those tend to be those on the extremes.  But in this time of increased threat of autocracy, there is an opportunity for a Republican to take a stand.  This is not just wishful thinking or idealism--the white nationalist vote is going to Trump.  Whatever is left will go to DeSantis and others who fit the bill--white "Christian" men.  Nikki Haley could be the candidate that grabs other voters.  Again, she has agency, she has a choice to make, and, until this week, she had somewhat of an advantage with her background--not just being a person of color (perhaps in denial about that) and a woman, but someone who had pulled down the confederate flag in a previous job.  She had the credentials to try to be the savior of the GOP.  

And Haley tossed it away.  Out of weakness. Due to cowardice.  She simply is not going to win an outbidding race against Trump or against the other dudes in the race.  

So, we can blame the structure of the American politics--the winner take all process where small numbers of voters in primaries set the agenda--but we cannot let these politicians off.  They have responsibility for their stances.  We got here because of GOP weakness and temptation.  In 2016, GOP candidates didn't attack Trump directly because they wanted his voters--the deplorables that Hillary Clinton so aptly called them.  In 2024, the cowardice has a physical element to it--that Trump supporters have threatened violence.  But cowardice it still is--to run for Presidency and sell out whatever values one has and ultimately endanger oneself and one's family.  Again, Haley may think of herself as white, but she isn't to to white nationalists to whom she is pandering.  Indian-Americans may not be at the top of their hate list, but I am pretty sure Great Replacement Theorists worry about South Asians replacing white folks, just as they worry about Jews, Black Americans, Muslims, etc.  

Structure and agency are in play here--we need to hold accountable the politicians who pander to the worst instincts in people and we need to remember that Trump and Haley wouldn't be doing this stuff if it did not work, if there was not an audience for it.

* This is not just an American thing, of course, as Horowitz was inspired by the Sinhalese case in Sri Lanka.  These days, Canada is having a bit of the outbidding dynamic as the Conservative Party of Canada feels pressured by a small far right party run by, well, an idiot.  That case illustrates it is not just pressure but temptation.  The temptation to split off voters from the heterogeneous party.

** You don't have to be an historian to know that the two parties switched their positions/places on the rights of African-Americans to be free and to vote, but it doesn't hurt.  Follow Kevin Kruse on social media to get the basics as he has responded extensively to the whole "hey, the Dems were the party of racism" stuff.  It is called partisan realignment for a reason--the parties and voters realigned in response to the response to the civil rights movement.

Thinking About Israel and Palestine: Headaches and Insomnia

 I am not sure that the past month's headaches and insomnia are due to the challenges of thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I am going to use that as my intro to this effort to think through this stuff.

Usual caveats apply: I am not a political theorist or moral philosopher, I am not an expert on the conflict itself.  Oh, and I was raised Jewish and the education I got at Hebrew school did not adequately present the realities of the past.  I did take one Mideast politics course in college, and I did spend one week on an amazing and amazingly depressing tour of Israel and Palestine with a bunch of other academics four years ago.

Words Fail, Theories We Have Many

Gaza in the distance

 I have spent most of my career engaged in the five d's of dodgeball when it comes to the Mideast and especially the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Despite starting my career with the international relations of ethnic conflict, I managed a total of one piece of research on the Mideast, and that was more by accident than by design.  I got asked to join an edited volume project by a terrific Mideast scholar, Shibley Telhami, after one of my very best job talks (which did not produce a job).   

Bomb shelter next to a kindergarten if
I remember correctly

When I turned to doing civil-military relations, I was asked if I was including Israel in my multi-democracy study, and I said nope.  I have a better explanation for that--that as a very militarized society, its' civil-military relations are far less comparable.  

Bus stop, shelter in a town that
was probably overrun last weekend

But on the ethnic conflict side?  Maybe I refrained because the one time I raised it as an illustration in a job talk, it did not go well.  That lesson was certainly reinforced by the experience of teaching US Foreign Policy the semester the US invaded Iraq. That class quickly divided into pro and anti factions based on how the students identified with one side or the other of the Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Perhaps it is because of a conflict between my background/identity and my scholarly work.  I often joked that the three things I learned in Hebrew school were: enough Hebrew (barely) to get through my Bar Mitzvah, much about the Holocaust and the history of oppression of the Jews, and that Israel was empty before the Jews got there and everything Israel does is right.  The last is the most relevant although the second obviously hits hard when more Jews died in one day due to violence this weekend than any other time since the Holocaust apparently.  I definitely was miseducated about the history of Israel.  I was also conflicted about my upbringing since I hated Hebrew school (I never fit in or came close), never believed in the religion, and came to realize my identity as Jew is defined by the reality that Nazis would have included me in their roundups no matter what I believe.  That is, identity is not defined by oneself but by the interaction of oneself with others, and as long as folks saw me as Jewish, it was less relevant what I believed.

Open air prison ....

So, that ambivalence then hits the stuff I have picked up from the work on ethnic conflict.  I can see via those lenses that ancient hatred is not really what is going here, but political dynamics in Israel and in the Palestinian community.  There is outbidding and pandering to extremists in both, which then feed the outbidding and pandering in the other.  Netanyahu feeds Hamas, and Hamas feeds Netanyahu.  When I visited in 2019, my first visit, as part of a group tour of IR scholars, I got to see how much has been locked in, that bad decisions beget bad decisions.  That Israeli generals told me that the only response to violence is to hit harder than they hit you, as if this were Chicago with the Untouchables fighting Capone.  I could see their point of view, but again, it was a path to more violence.  I left Israel, like many of those on the trip, sad and frustrated--that the future of Israel and of the Palestinians was bleak--that there was no way out and no one in or near power was interested in finding one.  And this happens.

So, I see people saying that an unprovoked Israel deserves all of our support.  And I have to recoil a bit, as Israel has done a shit ton of provoking via its empowering of rabid settlers who have encroached on the Mosque and engaged in lots of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.  But I also recoil when I hear folks talk about Hamas being part of anti-colonial struggle, as, yes, the Palestinians do have legitimate grievances, but Hamas is an awful, theocratic, maybe nihilist entity that did truly barbaric things.  Yet, I also know that Israel is going to kill a lot of Palestinian kids in Gaza since, yes, the population of Gaza is about 50% under 18.  War crimes do not justify war crimes.  And more violence is not going cause this conflict to go away. 

Pretty sure those towers are now destroyed

Both sides need far better governance, actors who don't benefit from the other side being radicalized.  But the institutions and dynamics of each are perverse and reinforcing.  I hope that Netanyahu pays a high price for letting this happen on his watch, but I seriously doubt that Israeli politics is going to move to the center as a result.  The flavors of the more successful parties in Israel are all variants of far right.  The left/center was broken by the second Intifada, and I doubt that these events will resurrect them.  I know less and understand less the Palestinian side, but I am pretty sure that air strikes are not going to lead to moderates taking power.

 

 So, I have rambled without reaching a clear idea of who should do what. Which is probably fitting.  And also explains why I have been reluctant to discuss this stuff--not just a bad job talk in 1993, but because the reality is so difficult, twisted, and painful.

Update:

I got into a conversation with my sister during the weekly family zoom, and she pressed me on when have ethnic conflicts ended peacefully rather than through conquest.  I gave the easy answer: South Africa.  But that conversation reminded me of the basic rules of ethnic conflict:

1. Most ethnic groups, no matter their history, are at peace: violence is rare.
2. When there is violence, it ends. No place is constantly at war forever.
3. The past constrains choices but does not determine the present.  It is up to today's politicians to decide what to do, and the incentives the structures/systems provide influence but do not determine.  Agency remains.

Which means it didn't have to be this way, it didn't have to happen this weekend, while there are dynamics locking the parties in, those dynamics can be resisted, and, yes, outsiders could play some role in either exacerbating or ameliorating the nasty dynamics.

Identities and Conflict: Recurring B Mitzvah Edition

I went to Florida for a relative's Bat Mitzvah.  As I have remarked earlier here, these events make me feel uncomfy as I am not a believer.  Many of the prayers and songs are burned into my memory based on the years I had to go to the various services before I left home.  My father kept reminding me of the Jewish opportunities at college, which caused me to wonder whether he was either relentlessly optimistic or just in denial.  So, the only times I go to synagogues or temples are wedding and Bax Mitzvahs.  

This time, something else helped make me feel a part of this community, reinforcing my identity as a Jew--the obstacles in the driveway that forced me to drive left/right/left/right and prevented me or anyone from entering the parking lot quickly.  Yes, this synagogue had an entrance similar to those at military bases... which speaks to the threats facing Jews in North America.  At the last BM in the fall, there was a metal detector and some heavy security at the door of the synagogue in NY.  It used to be the case that when I walked in a strange city, I knew I was near an American embassy when I noted an increase in security barriers.  These days, seeing such stuff tells me that I am near either an embassy or a synagogue.  

The threat of violence is real. Anti-semitism, along with the other hates--misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and xenophobia--is on the rise.  At CPAC this week, the ethnic outbidding to appeal to the whitest, most "christian" folks produced much targeting of transgender people, but these folks and their pals didn't stop there.  Nick Fuentes, who got to hang with Trump not that long ago, apparently talked about all kinds of folks (or isms, which really are targeting people) that need to go.

So, identity is about us and them.  And right now these folks out there are making me feel more Jewish because a basic part of that id is the threat, realized in pogroms long ago, in the Holocaust, and now in smaller scale violence, is increasing again.  So, I don't believe in all the religious stuff, but I do believe that there are folks out there that would love to put me and my relatives into showers and ovens.  So, I feel the us because the them is getting so toxic, so scary.

This is not going to go away anytime soon especially when major political parties--Republicans in the US--worry more about alienating the Nazi wannabe's in their base than standing up for freedom.  The supposed party of freedom is very much becoming a party of tyranny.  

While I loved seeing my extended family this weekend, I can't help but notice the dark side of identity and the threat we face. 

This Is Canada

 In the aftermath of a mass murder attack, folks tend to say: this isn't America or this isn't Canada.  As Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino noted, this is very much America.  Canada isn't the US--it has less gun violence, its racial politics are different, but, yes, violence is inherent in the system.

In 2015, after violent Islamophobic hate crimes in Toronto, some local Muslim girls were warned not to jaywalk in case a driver decided impulsively to hit them.

So, many people have worried about this exact kind of attack for at least six years. https://t.co/LKd7XbGM0t

— Selena Ross (@seleross) June 9, 2021

We just had an attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario, where a driver killed four members of the family leaving the youngest severely wounded and orphaned.  This is not the first attack on Muslims.  An attack on a mosque was only four years ago.  It seems light years away when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed Syrian refugees in the face of rising xenophobia and Islamophobia.  Since then, Quebec has passed legislation squarely aimed against Muslim women who were hijabs as well as other religious minorities.  It may be too much to say that the recent violence is state sanctioned but not too far to say that the province has created a permissive environment that allows those who hate Muslims to feel as if they have a legitimate grievance.  

To be sure, this is not just a Quebec thing as that legislation is popular in the rest of Canada, that violence has occurred in Ontario not just this week but often.  That Muslims throughout Canada report hostility and harassment on a regular basis.  

This is a time of hate.  Several things are coming together.  The pandemic and the economic challenges have caused people to seek blame, to be frustrated, to seek to act out.  Fox and its ilk compete to curry with the resentful--putting out the most awful brew of lies and blamecasting.  Social media giants like facebook, twitter, and google have pursued clicks and encouraged others to do so, helping to radicalize folks.  The shift in right wing politics, where resentment boils over, has led to politicians either tolerating awful stuff because they fear electoral repercussions (notice the Republicans buying into the Big Lie, notice the Conservative Party of Canada having fights about whether to go further right or to become more centrist) or embracing it in order to get votes.  The People's Party of Canada is a xenophobic party seeking to use hate to get beyond two percent of the vote.  The centrist parties are reluctant to confront the hate of the so-called populists.  Trudeau criticized the Quebec legislation when it came out a few years ago. Now, he mostly demurs.  

These are very dangerous times for those who are different and for Democracy.  Canada is in better shape since its diversity and its institutions make it hard for the Conservatives to shift further right and still win elections. But the environment is still breeding violence.  Perhaps most Canadians buy into some version of the multicultural ideal of strength from diversity, living with each other, but there are sufficient numbers of folks out there willing to do harm.  This, alas, is Canada.

215 and Then So Many More

 Canada has been shaken by the discovery of a mass grave for 215 Indigenous kids at a residential school.  Children from Indigenous families were taken away from their communities and forced to go these schools that were designed to remove their identities and make them as white and as Christian (Catholic, either mostly or entirely, I have not read enough to be sure) as possible.  The conditions at these places caused tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases to thrive, not unlike concentration camps I have toured in Germany, and priests and nuns and others abused the children.  

As an immigrant, I did not have the opportunity to be failed by Canadian schools (my Canadian friends report not getting much info about this stuff when they went to school).  Instead, I learned only a smidge as this stuff was referred to in the citizenship guide we read to prepare for the test:

This text understates the harm as the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that 4,000 children died at these schools--a far higher rate than kids in the rest of the population--and a number that many see as an underestimate.  What always gets me is that these policies and schools continued into the 1990s.  Well, that's not fair.  They continue to this day but in a different form.  Instead of residential schools akin to concentration camps, we have kids taken away from their families due to welfare policies where the parents are seen as unfit due to the scars and legacies of the past--that past oppression and persecution has lead to poverty and other poor conditions, so the state comes in and takes kids away.  

The Commission had all kinds of recommendations including spending money on finding the rest of the mass graves.  It does appear that some of this has been funded, but it is not clear to me why so little progress has been made.  

The US has a similar situation as the equivalent of re-education camps were set up in the US, they had high rates of death and disease and accidents.  I don't know if this stuff is covered in the Native American museum in Washington, DC, as my visit there was cut short.  Each year (except during pandemics), my daughter and I visit a few Smithsonian museums on the Mall in DC.  Three years ago, we went to the Native American History Museum, but we didn't stay long.  My daughter was really uncomfortable with the government that continues to persecute Native Americans curating a museum about them.  There were displays that were critical of the Trail of Tears and about Standing Rock, but I don't remember anything about the damage done to the kids.  

Anyhow, because I didn't know that much about the Canadian experience, I felt a bit more comfortable with genocide being used to describe what the US did to Native Americans than what Canada did to the First Nations.  The more I learn, the more I realize that the word fits only too well.  Much more needs to be done to recognize what happened, to compensate for the damage, and to improve the policies and the realities that the Indigenous people of Canada face. 

The Outbidding Has Begun

 This week, I tweeted about how the upcoming primary races in the GOP will be outbidding contests.  I want to explain what I meant and suggest that it is already a thing.  The reason why this is important is that ethnic outbidding fosters violence, whether the outbidders win or lose.  

For me, it goes back to Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict.  But others observed the basic dynamics as well.  When you have a homogeneous party compete with a heterogeneous one, the competition with the homogeneous party will push the candidates to make more and more extreme claims to be the best defender of that group.  I always referred to Sri Lanka, as it was seen as a likely case for democracy and such after the British left.  But over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the Sinhalese politicians who competed for 90% (more or less) of the vote learned to appeal to the Sinhalese population of Sri Lanka by targeting policies against the Tamil minority.  Each election became, in essence, an auction for the parties to make the highest bid--how best to oppress the minority.  In such auctions, moderation tends to get punished by voters.  

The Republican Party, since the realignment of the 1960s in response to resentment towards the civil rights movement, has become increasingly homogeneous -- the party of white Christians.  The Democrats are the heterogeneous party, with many ethnic, religious, and racial groups supporting it.  Sure, you get various individuals from minority groups voting GOP, but the vast majority are white.  And, of course, the big question is: who shows up in primaries?  The development of safe seats due to gerrymandering and sorting (people moving to where they feel comfy) has meant that the dynamic of politicians moving to the center during the general election is no longer so relevant or so strong.  Instead, candidates and incumbents worry about who is on their flanks during the primaries.  Why?  Because the most enthusiastic folks tend to show up in primaries and they happen to be right wing folks for the GOP and left wing folks for the Dems. We saw the GOP move further to the right in the 1990s as Gingrich and others focused on eliminating RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and punishing folks who reached across the aisle.  

Fast forward to 2016: about 20 candidates are running for President, and one of them is making the bluntest, most naked appeals to white supremacy--Trump--and the rest are too scared of alienating that part of the Republican base to confront Trump.  They hoped he would self-destruct (and he tried mightily), with the last survivor picking up that part of the base.  That was definitely Ted Cruz's strategy.  And, yes, that Ted Cruz was the second strongest candidate in 2016 says much about the contemporary Republican party.

With a nakedly white supremacist Republican administration, opposition within the party mostly died.  Instead, Republicans feared that Trump would punish any opposition, any effort to compromise or moderate, by supporting candidates to primary incumbents.  So, in 2020, we got QAnon types running, pushing the Republican incumbents to either support the furthest right-wing stances or stay silent.  Those incumbents who recognized Biden's election early faced not just the likelihood of being primaried but also threats directed against them and their families.

Now, you have many Republicans who will say that Biden is the President but not say that he won the election fairly.  This is all about anticipating the next set of primaries.  The only people in the GOP now that do not fear being outflanked on the right in the next primaries are those who are retiring or those who are already very far out there (Romney is a semi-exception).  So, the outbidding has already begun--we already have politicians fearing being outflanked, so they are taking extreme stances, which undermine US democracy and incite violence.

Of course, there is another actor in all of this: Fox.  Fox has become more and more consistent in voicing the far right.  Tucker Carlson now sets the agenda for the entire network, as the latest episode of the Press Box podcast makes clear.  The question these days is which pieces that appear on the network aren't white supremacist and far right.  And yet Fox faces outbidding pressures as well.  They worry about losing market share to Newsmax and OANN, which are yet further to the right.

As a contrast, the Dems are very much a heterogeneous party, which can drive people crazy as it is never doing what all members of the party wants.  But note that their primary in 2020 was not about who belongs in the party, not really, but about, dare I say it, electability and policy issues.  A white supremacist stance would have alienated key voters.  There was not even a Clinton-esque Sista Souljah moment to prove that a candidate was sufficiently friendly to white folks.  Instead, ironically, the Black women of South Carolina looked around and realized that it was better to have a bland white dude run and win than a Black candidate (Harris or Booker) or a woman (Harris or Warren or Klobuchar or etc.).  

The GOP's ethnic outbidding has hurt the Dems by peeling off white voters.  But as the country gets increasingly diverse, the GOP electorate gets relatively smaller, which means that the Republicans face a difficult choice: become less white supremacist and reach out to other ethnic groups OR double down by stopping immigration and suppressing the votes of non-whites.  And, yes, they have chosen the latter even though GOP performance among Latinos suggests another way to go.  But who is going to show up in primaries: these conservative Latinos or the white supremacists?

The only choice is to game the system, and that is what they are doing now.  Which means that the Dems must do everything they can to prevent that from happening including killing the filibuster at least on voting rights issues, if not everything else.  

And, yes, the GOP and Fox will continue to incite violence and then blame mental health (despite not pushing for funding for mental health efforts) when white dudes kill women, non-white people, and non-Christians.  Alas, we are in for more violence, not less. 

Who Is Doing the Rioting?

Santa Cruz (I think) police chief leading

I am no expert in riots nor policing, but my training and my experience tells me to look for the patterns, to look for the variation.  Not every city seems to be waging war on its citizens this weekend.  This video does show that there is a widespread pattern of abusive conduct.  But we also have seen video of cities where the mayors and police chiefs try to and successfully de-escalate.  Camden is a striking example because it is a city with much problematic history, with much inequality.

When I studied ethnic conflict more than a decade ago, I was struck by works (if I remember correctly, Steven Wilkinson and, of course, Donald Horowitz) that emphasized the agency of the state.  That riots tend to happen where the local/regional governments either permit riots or encourage them.  This weekend we saw so many police officers in so many cities over-reacting, engaging in behavior that was far too aggressive.  In NY, we see cops driving through protestors.  In other cities, we see cops destroying the milk reserves of the citizens (milk is good for treating tear gas victims) and stealing their water.  We see cops shooting at people who are clearly the media. 

The question is not whether the protestors are out of control but whether the cops are doing this because they are out of control or because they are actually being controlled.  Note the statement today by the NYPD commissioner:

To the Members of the NYPD:

What you’ve endured these last couple of days and nights—like much of 2020, so far—was unprecedented. In no small way, I want you to know that I’m extremely proud of the way you’ve comported yourselves in the face of such persistent danger... pic.twitter.com/1ez0Ar17Ex

— Commissioner Shea (@NYPDShea) May 31, 2020

Even if many cops had performed well (not so sure that is true), how can a leader say that after the video of cops driving through protestors hits the airwaves?  What signal are you sending?  Mayor de Blasio did similarly.  No wonder things in NYC are so messed up--with leadership like this, the cops have impunity to act out, and, as the Trump Administration has taught us, if one has impunity, the worst, not the best, behaviors ensue.

Of course, there is another set of actors out there that are encouraging this behavior: police unions.  Unions serve their members, but they dis-serve their members when they protect the abusers causing the entire membership to be stained and to encourage bad behavior. 

One could blame the random white supremacists and anarchists who show up at these things, and we should. But they are not the systematic dynamic that is driving so much of the awful stuff we have seen across the United States.  What explains the variation is the quality of leadership in and above the police forces, the training they have done, and the doctrine they have established.  Is the priority protecting the cops or the citizens?  Is the focus on property or on people? Is the effort aimed at de-escalating or escalating?  Because there is variation among American cities, the focus should be on the factors that exist in those cities that remained peaceful versus those that are present where the police saw the public as their enemy.

The various National Guard units may help or hurt depending on their training and their leadership.  I worry a great deal about the 82nd Airborne or some other regular army force showing up mostly because I don't they have been doing much crowd control training lately.  So, they will be poorly prepared.  Oh, and their leadership--the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense--are not up to the task.  I could and probably will blog at length at the civ-mil problems of calling out the military in a time like this, but suffice to say that a President who has encouraged the police to be more violent is not the guy who should be commanding troops while cities are burning.

Times like these show us that leadership matters.  And, alas, from Minneapolis to NYC to the White House, good leadership is in short supply. 

Quarantine, Week 11: The Worst Week

Sure, there were worse weeks in China, in Italy, in Spain, and elsewhere, but, for me, for Canada, and for the United States, this was probably the worst week.  I found out that a friend from grad school died.  The Canadian Armed Forces troops sent to elder care facilities in Ontario and Quebec paid a significant price--the number of them testing positive for COVID jumped, and we learned that the witnessed such abuse and neglect that PTSD is going to be a significant problem.  The US started the week by going over 100,000 deaths (most assuredly an undercount) and ended with week by giving yet more of its global leadership to China by pulling out of the WHO, which may be quickly forgotten since so many cities burned last night. 

The murder of Black Americans by the state is nothing new, of course.  The 1619 project made abundantly clear that arbitrary killing of African-Americans in the United States is older than the country.  I don't remember 1968 nor any of the civil rights movement as I war a toddler, but I do remember the Philadelphia police dropping a bomb on the city, burning an entire Black neighborhood.  The LA riots happened when I was in Southern California and was thinking a lot about ethnic politics--I was working on my dissertation. 

At that time, I thought about how a concept from international relations helped to explain what I was seeing--the Security Dilemma.  In International Relations, there is no government, so every actor has to be alert to the actions of the others, for any advantage they get can be used against that actor.  In domestic society, it is supposed to be different--that government protects people so they do not have to be constantly alert.  When that breaks down, well, things look like international relations--arms races, strange alliances, self-destructive violence. 

I thought about it in this way because the riots in LA broke out not after Rodney King was beaten by the LA cops but after the trial where the jury found the cops not guilty.  That is when it was clear the police were combatants and not impartial enforcers of the law.

Looking back, I realize that I was quite blind.  Because the cops have always been combatants.  The variation over time between peace and riots has not been due to when the cops and the prosecutors and the judges were seen as impartial or not, but rather how much anger, fear, and resentment had been built up and whether there was progress or regression going on.  1992 LA had a broader context that became clearer later--that corruption and abuse--the Rampart Division in particular--was rampant.  That the African-American community had felt under siege in large part because it was.

Over the past several years (decade?), we have had story after story of cops killing Black americans, that the cops are quick to fire on Black men they think are suspicious while treating White men differently.  So many spree killers, who are almost always white, seem to get captured alive, while some kid with a toy gun or a man with a cell phone get shot while surrounded by four or fourteen cops.  In the past few weeks, we have seen several examples with George Floyd's murder lighting the latest fuse. 

Trump, of course, pours gasoline on the fire, invoking segregationist rhetoric.  I guess the surprise is that the protests and riots are happening now, amid a pandemic, rather than a few years ago with the election of a nakedly white supremacist administration.  Remember that one of its first acts was to appoint as Attorney General a man who was seen in the mid-1980s to be too racist to be a federal judge by the Senate. 

Maybe the old ethnic security dilemma still applies, but just as war is not a constant in International Relations but its potential is always looming, in the United States (and in Canada and elsewhere), the state is always a threat, but whether it produces violence and whether it produces reactions by those that are threatened varies over time.  These dynamics can be more or less acute.  The very visibly and unambiguously egregious actions by the Minneapolis cop and the failure of the city to respond quickly set things off this time.  The structures of racism, of oppression, and fear were always there, with the death toll of African-Americans climbing both due to police misconduct and the very unevenly felt pandemic. But, yes, it took an event to spark the outrage. 

UPDATE: As I see more and more evidence that much of the looting and burning has been done by white people, who may be a mix of provocateurs and crappy allies, it reminds me that the ethnic security dilemmas of Yugoslavia were largely lit by criminals mobilized for the task by Serb nationalists.

None of this should be surprising because none of this is new.  I used to argue with my daughter about the state of progress--that it was happening but not fast enough for her taste.  And her arguments were more convincing than mine.  Really hard to be patient and work for change when people are dying every week.  Well, we no longer have those arguments for three reasons: a) she went to college and then to the other side of the continent; b) she won those arguments; and c) the election of Trump was pure regression, driven in large part by the resentment of whites who feared losing their position of supremacy. 

To be clear, there is still hope.  Things can improve, but it takes more than just the election of Democrats as Minneapolis is a Democratic city in a Democratic state.  It requires mayors and prosecutors and governors and attorney generals and, of course, publics to hold police accountable when they do wrong, to focus effort on kicking white supremacists out of police forces and the armed forces, and to do much more.  Being Democrat is not sufficient, they have to actually do their damned jobs for their constituents--that the job of the police is to protect and serve the public--all of the public--and not just to protect and serve themselves.  The training should not focus on having a hair trigger when faced with a threat, but to develop "courageous restraint" and be willing to fire second, not first.  The onus of risk in any encounter between citizen and cop should be on the cops--that their lives should be at risk, not the citizens.  The focus should be on bringing back alive the alleged perpetrators.  If the cops can bring in many spree killers alive, why can't they bring in alive Black men who "fit the description?"

And, yes, defeating Trump is a necessary but insufficient step for making progress.

Berlin Wall Falling: Thirty Years Later

I had the chance to go to Berlin when I was doing my Eurailpass tour of Europe in 1987, but it was kind of out of the way and cost more money.  So, I didn't, thinking I could go see the wall some other time.  And then the world changed.  The question is: how much?

People have been reacting online in a couple of ways:

• the fall of the wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe pale in comparison to the rise of China in terms of major shifts in international relations
• the fall of the wall and democratization produced much conflict
• walls are back in fashion.

My basic take is that we tend to observe what we want.  What did we expect on that amazing night thirty years ago?  Would we have expected Russia to be led by trolls seeking to mess with pretty much everything?  Not sure.  Would we have expected most of Eastern Europe to become and remain democratic thirty years later?  Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, and Poland are the exceptions, a growing group that should cause much dismay.  However, there was both more and less ethnic conflict than one might have expected.  When empires fall, ethnic conflict ensues.  Thanks to some interventions and some other dynamics, Yugoslavia largely remained the exception and not the rule.

Would we have expected a reunified Germany to be looked upon as one of the few remaining powerful supporters of the liberal international order?  Remember how nervous some countries were about a reunified Germany.  These days we ask Germany to do more, not less.

Checkpoint Charlie

I have been to Berlin several times to do and to present research.  I tend to go to the same places--Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery










I do think much has changed and much of it for the better.  Europe is not perfect, but it is far better off being unified than divided.  There may be some holes in the map of European democracy, but most Europeans are living free.  There might be lots of dissatisfaction, but, thus far, opposition to most governments has been peaceful and exercised through the ballot boxes.  We can be disappointed about the backsliding, but we should remember how much progress has been made. 

To say that China's rise is hugely important should not diminish the meaning and relevance of the fall of Communism in Europe, the mostly enthusiastic embrace of democracy, and all that the Europeans have accomplished since 1989.  The irony, of course, is the defeat of the far left in the late 1980s has been replaced by the emergence of the far right abetted by Russia.  Brexit would not have happened had not the Conservatives tried to placate their right flank.  Trump, well, he has more than abetted the far right in the US and around the world.  So, we can be plenty depressed on this day as well. 

I will choose to focus on the upside, that so much changed 30 years ago, most of it for the better.  If we screw up what we inherited, that is on us. 

Dissertation Question Du Jour: What Happens to Outbidders?

I have long thought to post here good research questions that I don't have time or ability to answer, and was inspired yesterday by this question:

You are an expert on ethnic conflict. It would seem that conservatives/Republicans act like a threatened ethnic group. What does the literature predicts will happen if Trump is impeached?

— OPA (@ObservatoireUS) August 28, 2018

To be clear, of course, I don't think impeachment is going to happen.  But the question is important anyway.  Since it was put in the context of my expertise on ethnic conflict (which is, to be honest, a bit dated lately since I am focused on other stuff, but I plan to get back to), I re-cast the question to fit the literature: when a homogeneous party has an outbidding process that leads to capture by extremists, what happens when the extremists are toppled?

My short answer: damned if I know.  I never studied that, and what I read tended to focus on the development of competition for members of a single group, which leads to more and more extreme promises to "defend" it against the Others.  This ultimately leads to marginalization of the Other group and that leads to violence.  But what happens when the extremists are pushed out?  I don't really know. 

I think this is an excellent research idea for someone else to study. 

In terms of what happens in 2020 if Trump loses, or if he gets 25th Amendmented (also not going to happen), I would imagine that a small portion of the white supremacists will see themselves being pushed back under the rocks from whence they came and fight back.  Yes, violence.  We already have white supremacist violence now, and we had more organized white supremacist violence in the 1990s, so, yeah, I would expect attacks by the suddenly disappointed white supremacists against both their usual targets (Sikhs who they think are Muslims, Latinx, the LGBTQ community, African-Americans, etc) but also Republicans who let them down. But, as we learned in 2016, I suck at predictions. So, take all of this with a grain of salt.  The only thing I can guarantee is that this would be an excellent dissertation question. 

always appropriate student art

Identity Politics: We All Got Them

Identities are like fruitcakes: we all got them, what are we going to do with them. When people say we shouldn't do identity politics or that identity politics is something we can avoid, I get a wee bit annoyed. Why? Because we all have identities, and they naturally and inevitably shape politics. Let me take a step back and then forward.

The first half of my career, I very much focused on ethnic politics and nationalism since I was interested in the international relations of ethnic conflict--secession and irredentism mostly.  So when I think about identity, I think of two things: groupness and implications for policy.  First, any identity sets up concepts of who is us and who is them and how tolerant one is of the them.  Much identity politics is about competing to define who the us is and how we should treat the others.  Are Jews white? Who is an American?  Who is Canadian? The political competition within the Canadian Conservative Party about immigration and multiculturalism is partly about figuring out who is a Canadian. The political programs of both Harper and Trudeau have been about defining what it means to be Canadian--why should anyone care about the War of 1812.  Anyhow, sorry for the Canadian tangent, but the key is this: much identity politics is about defining who are the relevant actors, whose interests matter most.  Note the post-election discussions of the working class and ... the white working class.  Also, note how Hindu Indian-Americans were fans of Islamophobic Trump until they started to realize that Trump is a white supremacist, and Indians are not white.  Intersectionality is a thing.

The second way to think about identities is that we all have multiple identities, and each one contains some kind of implications for various policies.  Religion influences attitudes about sexuality, the role of state in religion and vice version, gender, notions of justice, education, etc.  Language tends to affect policy preferences about jobs and education.  Race? If it were not freighted with history, maybe no clear implication for politics, but since race in the US is so much affected by the weight of past decisions, hells yeah, one's race affects one's political preferences.  So, much of politics is about making certain identities more salient than others, which then makes some issues more useful for creating coalitions and dividing the coalitions of the others. I lived through a Quebec election that was three-sided: one party was federal and tried to focus on goverance, a second was focused on Quebec independence (language and all that), and a third was focused on being intolerant of immigrants.  To be clear, no identity has a single political program.  Divisions between Martin Luther King and other African-Americans were partly about whether to change the system or separate.  Which is why Black Panther struck me--that it was people with the similar identities fighting about the implications for how one should engage the world.

Either way, much of politics is very much identity politics.  The only people who deny this reality are those whose identities already dominate politics.  I remember reading books about Race and US foreign policy--and it blew my mind to think that white folks and their race influenced US foreign policy.  Seems obvious now, but it was in a time and a context where folks were wondering about whether US foreign policy would remain rational and realist if other groups with other views of the
national interest, or their group's interests, would shape US foreign policy (Mrs. Spew considers anyone using the term identity politics dismissively is really anti-civil rights so she substitutes civil rights activism for identity politics). 

So, today, in the US, when I hear people dismiss identity politics, they tend to be white Christian folks who have always won and imposed their values on US politics (and projecting themselves, fear what the others would do if they are in power).  There was, of course, conflict among these folks about who and what counts as white (are Italians white? are Arabs?) and as Christian (in Lubbock, where I lived, the category of Christian is much narrower than I conceived).  But these folks tend to agree that when People of Color push issues favorable to their group or point out that Black Lives Matter, they get upset, because they are uncomfortable with being informed that their vision of "All Lives Mattering" might just still have some identity politics to it.

In sum, identities always matter, politics is often about defining the content of the identity, the boundaries of identities and how one should treat those of other identities.

Ted Robert Gurr, a Tall Man

Last night, on the way back from Thanksgiving with the family, I learned that Ted Robert Gurr died over the holiday.  I knew Ted since 1998, so I have some thoughts I want to share.  First, about the title, whenever I bumped into Ted, I was always struck by how tall he was--in height, in stature, and in the way he presented himself.  He just always stood out--because he was tall and so distinguished.  I never saw him, well, as shabby as I can be at times.  His work so very much stood out.  He has over 30,000 citations, which is what legends in the field of political science get to and few others.  His H-index is 67--which meant he averaged something like two articles a year that each got more than 67 citations.  This might not mean much to outsiders, but it is mighty impressive to political scientists.  For how he viewed himself and how he worked at his vocation, see this interview conducted by one of his most successful (and, alas, most troubled) students--Will Moore.

His book, Why Men Rebel, is simply one of those books that is required reading and shaped the field for decades.  The basic argument, if I recall correctly,* is that it is not absolute poverty that causes individuals (and, yes, mostly men although I don't remember gender being something he addressed in that book) but how people view themselves where they are versus where they feel they should be.  While it has  been attacked ever since, the idea helps to make sense of Trump voters today, why richer territories seek to secede, and so on.
*  I am not doing any re-reading of his work to write this as I am not nearly as good as Ted at managing my time.

His second major contribution, in my view, is that he created heaps of public goods--widely used datasets.  Polity, evaluating the world's countries on how democratic they are, was explicitly aimed to do exactly that and then became handy for democratic peace scholars and many others.  Minorities at Risk, which is where I come in, was actually not aimed to become a dataset for asking all kinds of questions about ethnic conflict.  It was designed to assess which minorities in the world were at risk of violence.  Yeah, it is in the title of the dataset, but the intent of the effort baked in a problem that eventually made it hard to use (until resurrected by Johanna Birnir and a bunch of other folks including me).  Anyhow, it was not really designed to be used by others, and one could tell since so many variables were coded as 0 meaning none, 1 meaning high, 2 meaning medium, and 3 meaning low.  Lots of re-coding had to be done.  Oy.

His second book using this, Peoples Versus States, and related pieces indicated that there is actually less ethnic violence now than earlier, which both runs against how we perceive the world (since the media covers ethnic violence, not ethnic peace) and showed that many countries had learned key lessons: that it may not be clear that giving folks more autonomy reduces violence, but taking it away (hey, Spain!!) is likely to cause it; that stable democracy (which Polity showed there is much more of) is better than the alternatives; that international management efforts might actually work.

Ted was definitely a gentleman and a scholar.  I got to know this personally (I have met other "gods" of poli sci, but he is the one I had the most interactions with).  I first interacted with Ted when I learned of MAR as I was trying to figure out how to test quantitatively the arguments in my dissertation.  He moved pretty quickly from being reluctant to share MAR to sending me copies of the raw coding sheets of the international support variables--how much assistance do groups receive from abroad and from whom.  I remember spending hours in my windowless office in Lubbock, taking those sheets and turning them into coded data.  It led to some of my first quantitative publications as well as the quant chapter of my first book.  At the same time, I examined MAR to see what it could tell me about separatism.  This led to a series of articles, but too late for a key opportunity.

I actually met Ted for the first time at a job interview at the University of Maryland in 1998.  This was one of the best job talks of my life, even though I didn't get the job.  How do I know?  It led to a fruitful partnership with Ted and the other MAR folks as well as an invitation to an edited volume project with another Maryland faculty member.  Anyhow, Ted had asked David Lake, who he thought was my adviser, to ask me to apply.  Which I did.  I ended up being fourth or fifth on the short list, and was brought in only after those folks didn't do well.  I did not rank highly on the original list in part because I had not done any quant work yet (it was all in process at the time) and I was pretty junior, and they wanted someone to eventually run MAR and essentially replace Ted.  Given how much I suck at coding data and managing graduate students to code data, they made the right decision.

My subsequent work using MAR data kept me connected to Ted.  When the dataset was attacked for its selection bias problem, I got invited to be on the newly created MAR advisory board and was named its convenor.  I still don't know what that role entails.  The board itself met once a year or so about ten years.  That board helped me connect to both senior scholars and to the next generation of Ted's students, and for that I will always be grateful.  I do remember being rude to Ted at the end of one of these because I had just gotten word that my dog died. I explained later, and he understood.

Finally, I can't think of Ted without remembering how he played a central role in my enduring love of TGIFridays.  At the end of my job interview, Ted had me sit in his office while he looked at his email, and then we got stuck in traffic on the BWI parkway to get to BWI airport.  I didn't have time to get food at the airport as we arrived just in time.   The plane was diverted to Tulsa or Oklahoma because of thunderstorms at Dallas/Fort Worth airport.  By the time we arrived at DFW around 11:30 all of the restaurants were closed and I had nothing to eat since a job talk lunch (small).  I was too cheap as an assistant professor to take a taxi far away from the airport (since all of the hotels nearby were already full of displaced passengers), so I was set for a long night of hunger pains at the airport.  But in the distance, TGIFridays was still lit.  They served that night until 2am, so I went there, and asked if they were still serving food, and they said yep.  They asked if I wanted a drink, and I said yep!  I then sat there, eating and drinking with my luggage, and scurrying out to grab pillows and blankets (both airplane size small) as they were being distributed.  Finally, they distributed cots, so I grabbed all of my stuff and took the cot to a quiet gate and tried to sleep.  In the morning, I woke up, and saw lots of legs with blue pants sticking out of the boxes that the cots had come in--Air Force cadets using the boxes to sleep--smart folks.  Anyhow, TGIFriday's opened at 6am, so I had breakfast and then got on my plane to Lubbock.  And it was all much more indelibly etched in my mind since Ted took his time reading his email before taking me to the airport.

I chatted with Ted briefly over the past few years at conferences, but we haven't talked much over the past several years.  I will always remember Ted fondly for not giving me a job despite giving one of my best talks as he did make a huge difference in my career--providing me with data that led to some of my most cited and perhaps even influential publications, involving me with a great group of people to improve and then rescue the dataset, and being a hell of a model.  I will never stand as tall as he did, but being perched on his shoulder has given me a hell of a view and a big leg up in this profession.  Rest in peace, Ted. 

Starting Points Revisited

A friend asked her friends for copies of their dissertation proposals as she teaches her graduate students how to propose.  So, I skimmed mine as I was attaching it to an email to her.  The timing of all of this is pretty good, since one of the classes I am teaching this semester is aimed at getting NPSIA's students to the starting line of their dissertation--a completed proposal.

As I skimmed, I had some reactions. 

• Damn, that was a long time ago.  I defended the proposal in June of 1991 so it seems very dated.  It starts thusly:

The capture of the capital of Ethiopia by Eritrean separatists and other groups may lead to an unprecedented event in Africa: a successful secession.  A similar event may be occurring in Somalia as rebels have taken control of the northern part of the country, declaring independence as the new sovereign state of Somaliland.  Meanwhile, Yugoslavia's breakdown seems imminent as Hungary provides small arms to Croatian separatists.    Finally, though the Gulf War ended, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy has continued.  These events demonstrate the tenacity of ethnic conflict and the nature of such conflicts to draw in other states.  In the post-Cold War era, the international consequences of ethnic conflict need to be studied. 

"Yugoslavia's breakdown seems imminent...."  Maybe.  "Kurdish struggle for autonomy has continued.  What is old is new again.  I have to say the last line of the intro para is about as perceptive as anything I have ever written.  Indeed, the IR of ethnic conflict was about to become a thing, and I said so in 1991.  I have gotten a lot wrong (facebook reminds me that I predicted the outcome of the 2016 on this date last year).

• So much use of the L word: literature.  Ug.  Since then, I have become a forceful advocate for not thinking about one's lit review as a lit review but as building blocks.  I didn't know better.  I was so young.
• In my attempt to be a good social scientist, I came up with a 3x3, not quite realizing that a 2x2 was what I needed:

 

•  Looking back, I realize that I have remained very wedded to two core logics that were the starting point of my dissertation: that when two parties compete for the same group, it will lead to outbidding and thus extreme stances on policies (political Units per Communal Group > 1) AND when a party seeks support from multiple ethnic groups (one political unit and multiple CGs), the party will have to moderate its claims and avoid appeals to a single group.  Indeed, much of my understanding of last year's election harks back to these two ethnic political logics that apparently have shaped my destiny.
• The methodology section was a pack of pie crust promises!  
• No quant study.  Indeed, numbers only came back into my work a few years after I finished my dissertation as I discovered a collection of data that would be of much help--the Minorities at Risk Dataset.
• My proposed list of case studies was far from what I did.  I proposed studying a bunch of individual countries over time to see what varied.  What I did mostly was study a handful of secessionist crises and compare how a dozen or more countries reacted to the particular crisis... with one exception.  I did study Somalia's support for irredentism over time, which dropped out of the book but became an article.

Anyhow, it is time for me to read a former student's book manuscript, based on her dissertation which I do remember, based on her proposal, of which I have little memory.

Thanks for joining me in today's trip via the wayback machine.